Tuesday, March 31, 2015

I cited the
international Slow Art Day in TrendsWatch2015 as one effort to encourage people to
bring leisurely attention to bear on the museum. As Slow Art Day 2015
is fast approaching—it’s on April 11—I tracked down two museums that have
participated in the past and will do so again this year. In today’s post, Michelle
Moon, Assistant Director for Adult Programs at the Peabody Essex Museum, and Celeste Fetta, Chief Educator, Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts, answer a few questions about their experiences with the
event.

Michelle: At the Peabody Essex Museum, we believe strongly
that art experiences can be deeply transformative, so I’m always on the lookout
for unexpected ways to draw people into moments of deeper connection with
artwork. When Slow Art Day launched, I understood its potential in part because
I’ve been involved in the “slow movement” for nearly ten years as a chapter
co-founder and regional governor for Slow Food USA. It’s led me to appreciate
how “slow” experiences become opportunities for more meaningful and mindful
interactions with our surroundings. I like the way it empowers individual
interpretation in non-didactic, open-ended discussion.

Celeste: VMFA is in the midst of a transition for our
gallery practice—moving away from strictly delivering information to
observation, interaction, dialogue, and discussion in order to engage the
visitor in ways that are suited to his or her learning style and/or needs.
About three years ago, Slow Art
Day found us through a community volunteer and former instructor who organized
a group of friends to participate. It’s a natural fit to our revised philosophy
of spending time with a work of art to afford a natural pathway of discovery.
Now we now offer classes that focus on one work of art for an hour, approaching
the piece from a variety of perspectives, and that leads to fruitful
discussions.

How has the event worked
out?

Michelle: Each and every person who has participated has
found it to be transformative, a little oasis of absorption in an otherwise
busy culture. Our groups have had some great conversations, and in a society as
fragmented as ours, its potential to connect strangers over their reactions to
artwork is quite moving. The idea itself has also been a catalyst for thinking
about how to bring slow looking experiences to museums on a more regular basis.

But participation has been wobbly - we started with 11 people
the first year, then 8, then a low of 3, and last year 6 (including me and my
husband). I've experimented with different approaches to running the event,
including offering a suggested itinerary of items to view, creating a guide to
slow looking, and having an external coordinator. This year, we're going to try
offering 3 VTS-based experiences on the half-hour, then convene for lunch and
discussion in the museum cafe. I hope having the conversational experiences
come first will help break the ice, and perhaps draw in people from the galleries
who didn’t know in advance that Slow Art Day was happening.

Celeste: The
artist/volunteer who leads Slow Art Day lets us know in advance of her plans
and how she will coordinate sign-ups, usually through Eventbrite. As Slow Art
is a grass roots movement, it was natural to let this happen organically,
hosted and coordinated by a member of the community. We usually post the event
on our social media channels and then that’s it! She handles the rest, guiding
the group through the museum and then convening in the café for a discussion
afterwards. This works well for us because our permanent collection is free and
open 365 days a year, requiring no tickets.

I believe it’s been successful in two ways. The fact that it
is driven from our visitor base is a successful example of the transformation
of VMFA (and museums in general) from a repository to a place for the
community. Our tagline “It’s Your Art!” emphasizes our hope that visitors feel
like the collection and museum belongs to them. We welcome people to use the
galleries as an extension of their space, a community living room or a place of
solace- whatever fits their needs. The way this program is organized and run
reinforces this belief.

Slow Art Day is also important because it promotes the part
of our gallery practice which emphasizes close observation and discussion of
art. Taking time to explore a work of art through a multitude of pathways and
honoring each person’s point of view is key to engaging the viewer while
honoring art as a catalyst for conversation and dialogue.

Do you have any advice
for other museums considering participating in Slow Art Day in future years?

Michelle: SAD was initially developed as a viral,
community-driven idea, and I think it would really run best that way,
completely external to the museum. But the first year, we had no community
volunteer stepping up to organize, so I decided to make it part of our program.
An impassioned volunteer leader who's not officially sanctioned by the museum
may stand a better chance of activating their own participant community, using
alternative/viral channels and personal networks. Making it part of the museum
program seems to endow it with too much "officialness." I can't say
whether or not I'll re-up yet, but either way, I'd really like to see more
participation. It takes a lot of trumpeting to get folks out to try this new
experience, and museums have to weigh the cost/benefit of devoting
organizational time to a program with a smaller turnout, even if it has high
personal impact.

Organizers also need to adjust to the infrastructure of Slow
Art Day. It started as a personal project and has slowly developed into a more
formal group, so it runs a little differently than many other groups museum
programmers typically interact with. They prefer that SAD leaders join an email
list, which unfortunately involves dozens of emails per day from all over the
world during the weeks leading up to the program - which weighs down my
already-groaning inbox. I've communicated with them about it, and though they feel
pretty committed to having a robust exchange in the month before the program,
they are also listening to their participants and thinking about new engagement
tools, including online resource sharing to prevent that kind of message
backlog. Signing up through Eventbrite
is also a little bit tricky, especially for museums that already have their own
ticketing and reservation processes.

I have hopes that Slow Art Day continues to catch on and
grow. The power of carving out a few quiet moments to really interrogate
artworks from your own individual perspective is age-old, but we rarely make
time for it anymore. People who do feel refreshed, and the discussion afterward
helps them feel more connected to others and to their own emotions and
intellect. The outcomes are so valuable that the project can be worth doing,
even for a niche audience. I look forward to learning more from other SAD
leaders, whether in or outside of museums, about this interesting way of
inviting independent engagement with art.

Celeste: My advice would be to let a member of the community
host and support from the periphery, but be prepared to back up the practice
SAD promotes with a similar philosophy in your other gallery programs. It is
refreshing to know that people are looking for opportunities to take time with
a work of art to contemplate, appreciate (or not), and discuss their
impressions. As Michelle mentions, this is not a new concept, but a reboot of
an age-old practice. How great is it
that museums can be trendsetters by bringing an old school idea into the 21st
century?

If you want to
experience this slow event first-hand, check out the list of 2015 venues to find a
participating museum or gallery near you. You can also volunteer to host a group at
your museum. Either way, let Michelle, Celeste and me know how it goes, via comments on this post!

Monday, March 30, 2015

I read an article
in the Washington Post last Friday that resonated with some nascent thoughts
on the role of museums shaped by audiences born between 1980 and 2000.

The story, by Jura Konclus, looks at the “seismic shift of
stuff” underway as Baby Boomers clean out empty nests and downsize into retirement
only to find—surprise!—their Millennial offspring don’t want the dinner table,
sectional sofa, and 10 boxes of family archives. As she observes, “20- and
30-somethings don’t appear to be defined by their possessions, other than their
latest-generation cellphones.”

This is in part a result of the urban renaissance: dense,
walkable communities mean smaller living spaces and more reliance on shared
space and shared services. In addition, as the WashPo article points out,
Millennials store their memories on flashdrives and in the cloud, not in photo
albums.

So here’s my musing for the day: do Millennials attach less
value to stuff in general (whether their own possession or in a museum), or do
they, even more than their parents, see museums as display cases for things
they love? The prevalence of the one attitude or the other will have major
implications for museums. I wrote in TrendsWatch
2014 “museums would seem to be in a great position to provide people
with the pleasures of vicarious ownership…[in the future] even more people may
look to museums as repositories for the stuff they value but don’t want to take
care of.” On the other hand, if Millennials value experiences above possessions
(another point Konclus touches on), will that shape the focus of museums, away
from contemplation of the collections and towards participatory environments?

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Last weekend, Starbucks announced it will stop putting the slogan “Race Together” on coffee cups. Their spokesperson said this was a previously scheduled move, but to many it looked like a response to the flak the company has been taking over this initiative.

Race Together is the latest in a string of campaigns implemented by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, which have included tuition reimbursement for workers, “Create Jobs” to raise money to fund loans to small businesses , and politely pushing back against open carry laws. Most recently Shultz announced “Onward for Opportunity,” funded by his family foundation, to train soldiers for civilian jobs, assisted by Starbucks and other corporate partners.

While there was some snarking about the earlier campaigns, Race Together provoked particularly virulent responses. The Twitterverse lit up with complaints from customers who didn’t want to be ambushed with a dialog about race before they’d ingested their morning caffeine (“honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I've had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”), and from baristas being encouraged to initiate these discussions (““Being a barista is hard enough. Having to talk #RaceTogether with a woman in Lululemon pants while pouring pumpkin spice is just cruel.”). Snark aside, it is clear that many people on both sides of the counter felt deeply uncomfortable with this corporate prompt.

Given the swelling national discussion about race, power and prejudice (conscious or unconscious), why are so many people slamming the big S for tackling the issue? Particularly in a market shaped by Millennials, 89% of whom indicate they are more likely to buy from companies who support solutions to social issues? As a thoughtful article in the Economist points out, the pushback may stem in part from a perception that Starbucks is milking the issue to enhance its reputation (and profitability), but I think that the particular savageness of this response is due to a perceived lack of “authenticity” on the part of the company. As the Economist points out, when TOMS Shoes gives footwear to impoverished children it comes across as mission-related. Same for Dove’s Real Beauty campaign for healthy body image. So even if these efforts benefit the companies in question, they seem to be a natural fit—as were the earlier Starbucks initiatives. Fair trade coffee is directly related to their core business. Tuition reimbursement is tied to the welfare of their employees; Create Jobs to the well-being of their communities; Veteran job training to both. Even the “please don’t carry” request was positioned not as a statement for gun control (or against open carry laws) but as being about the comfort and well-being of customers. Race relations may seem like too big a leap, too far from the company’s legitimate areas of expertise or concern.

Which brings us to museums, and to #museumsrespondtoferguson—an informal network of museums and individuals (including a large cadre of tweeters and bloggers). Many museums, notably the Missouri History Museum and the Newseum, responded to the events in Ferguson with programs, panels, rapid response collecting, even of-the-moment modifications to exhibits. These responses were commendable and widely admired. I think these institutions were granted this respect because their actions come across as authentic—rooted in the their missions, relationship to their communities and to a history of serving in these ways. But I’m sure there are museums for which addressing race relations in America would be just as awkward a fit as it is for Starbucks.

I believe, deeply and fervently, that it is the moral and civic obligation of every nonprofit to make the world a better place. This requires staff to be attuned to the needs of their immediate community and the world, and to the organization’s mission, resources and capabilities. Collectively, museums can help heal countless wounds, large and small. For some museums this will mean tackling race relations, or climate change, or immigration reform through education or through activism. For other museums it may mean giving local homeless children a safe place to play, or feeding people hot soup while they discuss food issues impacting their communities. It might mean trying to prevent the extinction of non-human species by educating people about eating sustainable seafood or saving a local turtle. Or helping veterans heal from war-related trauma. And always, as AAM’s Museums and Community initiative emphasized, museums can facilitate community-driven conversations by making resources, like space, available for conversations and activism initiated by others.

But I get uncomfortable when high-profile coverage by the press results in pressure for all museums to address the headline issue of the day or week or month. It’s good to remind each other to stay alert to the needs of the world, to pay mindful attention to opportunities for our organization to help fill those needs. But I think we have to pay attention to the example of Starbucks, as well—museums have to act from an authentic place to be granted credibility and standing to weigh in. Otherwise, at best we risk using scarce time and resources to have no credible impact, and at worst we appear self-serving and naïve.

So, yes, please, #museumsrespond to all sorts of needs. But let’s divvy up the work, rather than all rushing to the same side of the boat. There is no lack of holes in the world that need patching, and we can each find ones we are best suited to mend.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

An open letter released today calls on natural history and
science museums to “cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate
change obfuscation.” The letter, signed by scientists and by one former museum
trustee & director, cites the AAM Code of Ethics for Museums, the preamble
of which touches on the obligations of our field to preserve the world we have
inherited for posterity, and to maintain museums’ integrity “so as to warrant
public confidence.”

The letter was organized by a pop-up, mobile museum—The
Natural History Museum—that debuted at the Queen’s Museum last year in
conjunction with the People’s Climate March in New York City. That museum
questions whether museums like the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
and the National Museum of Natural History have softened their message on
climate change as a consequence of receiving significant gifts from billionaire
David Koch (who also sits on the board of AMNH)—a concern reiterated in the
letter’s text.

Don’t be complacent, reading this post, if you work at an
art museum or a children’s museum. The larger takeaway is that we live in a
time when museums can’t take public confidence for granted. As I wrote in TrendsWatch
2015, nonprofits aren’t exempt from the ethical lens being brought to
bear on the world, and museums can’t take for granted that people think we are
the good guys. Those signing this letter believe that museums, as
mission-driven nonprofits, should take a stand on climate change, and this
stance echoes larger trends shaping nonprofit behavior. Nationally, we see
universities and other nonprofits engaging in fossil
fuel divestment. Union Seminary characterized the act of pulling
their investment from fossil fuels as “a bid to atone for the ’sin’ of
contributing to climate change.” In the U.K., Liberate Tate has staged a
series of interventions protesting the ties between cultural institutions and
the oil industry.

All of which leads to legitimate pressure on museums to
examine how their governance, policies and behavior are consonant with their
mission and values, and then communicate their choices to the public. But you
can agree with the premise of the letter (museums have a responsibility to be
trusted sources of information about climate change), without agreeing on the
solution. As Chris Norris, past president of the Society for the
Preservation of Natural History Collections, wrote
in a post on his blog, Prerogative of Harlots,

“There are those that say that Koch, as "one of the
biggest funders of groups that deny or misrepresent climate science and biggest
contributors to climate pollution" has no place in the leadership of an
institution like AMNH. But as I look at the challenges facing us, I wonder
whether it isn't exactly the opposite. If museums like AMNH can't accommodate
someone with Koch's views on their boards without compromising their message,
aren't we basically proving what the Lamar Smith's of this world would have
people believe - that we have abandoned any semblance of impartiality in favor
of outright advocacy? My - perhaps naive - belief is that if AMNH, or any other
museum for that matter, has a strong, honest, principled stance on the content
of its programs, it should be able to resist the attempts of any board member,
however wealthy or powerful, to push those programs in directions that
contradict the weight of evidence. It's better to have them at the table than
to exclude them and prove Smith and his congressional allies right.”

As with so many controversies that rock our field, the
underlying message is actually good: people care about museums and what we do.
People see museums as playing an important and influential role in education,
equipping our society to work through difficult issues like climate change (or
racial justice, or economic equity, or a host of other tremendously important
issues). But there is a range of opinions on how to live up to that
responsibility. Some people want museums to be agents
of change, proactively taking the lead in what they feel needs to be done
to save the world. Others prefer museums to be neutral platforms for debate,
trusted places where the community can come together to hash things out. (It’s
difficult, if not impossible, to do both—museums may have to choose whether
they will play the
role of facilitator or that of advocate.)

And this process of deciding what is right and good never
ends—because our social and cultural views on what a company, for profit or
nonprofit, should address changes over time. Ethics issues that are now
considered crucial were not mainstream concerns of the public in the past. I
touch on a few of these in TrendsWatch: animal rights in the production
of art; the collecting of natural history voucher specimens; keeping large
mammals in captivity; working conditions of migrant workers building museum
expansions overseas; unpaid internships. Or, per this letter, climate change.

But the underlying concern expressed in the missive is
age-old, and shaped much of the current standards for museums: how to draw
appropriate lines between those who fund museums and those who execute the
programs, or between the governing authority and the staff. Museum
professionals reading the guidelines for individual donor support may not
remember that standard was prompted by the “Sensations” exhibit at the Brooklyn
Museum in 1999. While the public may have been more focused on the controversy
over Chris Ofili using elephant dung in a portrait of the Virgin Mary, the
museum world was appalled by the level of control that the lender, Charles
Saatchi, played in the development of the exhibition, and the way in which his
financial support and influence were obscured.

The museum field responded by creating a framework to guide
the complex balancing act of firewalling intellectual integrity while honoring
the contributions of those who make museums possible through their time,
experience and money. That framework includes core elements that can guide
museums today as they face new ethical concerns, elements that include loyalty
to mission, public trust and accountability, transparency and attention to
potential conflicts of interest. Whatever role a museum chooses to play:
advocate or facilitator, activist or neutral arbiter, the key to retaining
public trust is letting daylight into the decisions. As the standards on donor
support point out, the bedrock of public accountability is a full and frank
discussion of the issue, both with the public and amongst museum professionals.

You can be part of that discussion at the upcoming AAM
annual meeting in Atlanta: The Natural History Museum will park their mobile
museum bus in MuseumExpo, and encourage attendees to come, discuss, argue, and
hash out the issues raised by their call to action. Stop by, weigh in, and help
shape our field’s response to emerging challenges in the 21st
century. I look forward to hearing what you have to say, in comments on this
post, via social media and on AAM’s Museum Junction.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

A lot of great folks joined me for last Friday’s Tweet chat on open data. Here’s a compilation of the resources, recommendations and questions shared by participants, to help you

Find me on Twitter
@futureofmuseums

with your exploration of “open.”

(This chat was the first in a series exploring the themes in the CFM forecasting report TrendsWatch 2015. For an introduction to open data and why it matters to museums, download the free PDF of the report. For another opportunity to delve into the forecast, join the staff of the New England Museums Association for an online discussion on April 1.)

Tweeters gave a special shout-out to the National Gallery of Art’s (@NGADC) open access image platform, which contains over 45,000 open access digital images available free for download and use.

Europeana is an internet portal that serves as an interface to millions of digitized records including books, paintings, films, museum collections and archival records.

Trove is a similar portal from the National Library of Australia, with access to over 400k online resources including maps, historic newspapers, music, books etc.

Digital Public Library of America is a national digital library based in the Boston Public Library, dedicated to creating an open, distributed network of online resources from libraries, archives and museums.

Not directly related to museum, archives, etc., but a great example of the powerful tools that can be created from open government data: GovTracks provides a bunch of online tools for monitoring bills & resolutions, members of Congress and their voting records, as well as access to the underlying data and an API.

Open Data Institute Blog (@ODIHQ). The Open Data Institute (co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web) is dedicated to “catalysing the evolution of open data culture to create economic, environmental, and social value.” The institute holds convenings, offers training and certificates, and conducts research.

The World Bank data blog is “a forum for discussing development data issues and open access to data. Open access to data is a key part of the World Bank's commitment to sharing our knowledge to improve people's lives.”

Professional development opportunity

Harvard’s MetLab holds Beautiful Data workshops exploring what can be done with the collections and visual data being made available by art museums. The next one is being offered July 6-16 this summer, at the newly reopened Harvard Art Museums, and applications are due April 1. It will focus on “difficult collections poised on the edge of the digital/material divide.” The application is competitive and participants receive a housing and travel stipend. Yow. This looks great.

References (papers, talks)

Start with this marvelous essay by my chat co-host, Ed Rodley (@erodley) of the Peabody Essex Museum in which he touts the Virtues of Promiscuity (when it comes to data). It appears in the Code|Words essay series on Medium, which you should be following in any case. Ed’s essay helped focus my attention on the promise and challenges of open museum data.

A "Pragmatic Examination of Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums" by Ed Summers and Dorothea Salo, available on the Cornell University Library site, sets out “some of the reasons why Linked Data is of interest to the cultural heritage community, what some of the pain points are for deploying it, and characterize[s] some pragmatic ways for cultural heritage organizations to realize the goals of Linked Data.”

A 2013 talk by Will Noel (@WillNoel) on The Commons and Digital Humanities in Museums. [20 minute video. Very watchable] Noel is director of the Special Collections Center at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and founding director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.

This article by Mia Ridge on poking around in the Cooper-Hewitt’s collections data, and the daunting practical barriers to messing around with 270,000 collections records.

If you host a discussion about TrendsWatch’s open data section, consider using these questions suggested during the chat to spur the conversation:

How will open data decisions will be made when they involve information from other cultures with their own laws?

How do we build a community of developers/users around newly accessible open data?

How can museums use open data to shape policy- collections management, collecting, conservation plans?

How can museums leverage open data to co-curate with communities and the public?

How can museums flip to open data as the default instead of the exception?

What data do museums generate that they don't realize may have useful/interesting applications?

How will open data change the way museums track the spread and success of our applications and data?

How can museums get data out to where it will be used?

Finally, here are some recommendations shared by the group regarding who to follow on Twitter for content on open data:

@willnoel (featured in the video cited above)

@mpedson (Michael Peter Edson, director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian)

@crowdconsortium (Crowd Consortium, a national organization that supports research and deployment of crowdsourcing for cultural heritage institutions)

My thanks to the following tweeters contributed the bulk of the content to the chat (which suggests to me they might be good people to follow, as well!)

@tjowens

@shanerichey at @crystalbridges

@designoz

@patrick_mj

@mwinikates

@bergfulton

@analucb

@nealstimler

@mia_out

@matthewdlincoln

@sherah1918

@jj_mayer

@PUBDOMAINHULK

And you can follow CFM on Twitter @futureofmuseums. I mostly tweet and retweet links to articles, blog posts and research reports both about trends in general and museums in particular. Much of this content does not end up in CFM's weekly Dispatches from the Future of Museums e-newsletter.

Friday, March 13, 2015

I came across Katie Paterson's Future Library Project in the course of researching TrendsWatch 2015, and cited it as an example of "slow culture." Extremely slow--Paterson has planted a forest to supply paper for books that will be printed a hundred years from now. While the trees mature, she is commissioning manuscripts (one per year), that will remain locked up until the library comes to fruition. For your Futurist Friday viewing, here is a video on the project:

The most interesting aspect of the project, to me, is Paterson's charge to the authors: "to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future." Seems to me this has similarities to the act of creating a museum collecting--trying to envision the future world we will speak to, imagine what they will want or need, what we want to say to that distant future. Of course, museums have to balance that future-focus with the need to serve audiences in our own time. How do you think collections might be different, absent that constraint? Here's your thought-assignment for the day: imagine a whole museum that you would design, build, populate with collections and exhibits, and then seal up for 100 (or 500, or a thousand) years. What would you want to say to the future audience streaming through the doors for the first time? How would your presumptions about the future shape what you choose to preserve and present?

*****

Last year we published a free app version of TrendsWatch 2014that contained embedded videos, but we didn't have any evidence people were using the app much (even though it was a beautiful way to read the report on an iPad). So this year I'm going to share related videos here on the blog throughout the year. If you liked the app version, let me know--maybe we will try it again next year.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

As someone who reads a killing amount of text every week—news, blogs, email, journals, newspapers, reports, even (luxury of luxuries) books—I find switching over to nonverbal mode to be a sweet relief. Besides, other modalities (pictures, videos, sound) give us a different perspective on a topic. That’s why I love it when I can share videos via Futurist Friday here on the Blog, and images via CFM’s Pinterest boards—these pictures and vids provide literal “glimpses of the future.”

If you don’t use Pinterest (yet) this is a short pitch for trying it out—it’s a free public site where you can create “visual bookmarks” and organize them in "boards" (folders) dedicated to any theme you choose, . The “pins” (saved images) retain their link to the original source on the web. By following pinners with related interests, you can find images that may link to relevant stories. An article in the Atlantic last year called the site a “database of intentions”—a place to get ideas for projects and interests.

That’s how I use Pinterest. When I start to write a talk, I scan my boards related to the topic, mentally illustrating my story as it takes shape. Every year I start a “secret” (non-public) board for next year’s TrendsWatch report, where I drop in compelling images that I come across in my weekly scanning. When I sit down in the fall to start identifying the next set of trends, looking over this idea board helps me see patterns.

Saving images also solves a mnemonic challenge presented by digital reading. Often I remember some fascinating nugget or fact, but not where I read it. Absent the tactile cues afforded by a print publication, it can be maddeningly difficult to track a stray memory back to its source. I solve this in part by bookmarking digital articles using Diigo, but also by pinning associated images. I may not be able to remember visual cues (logo, site banner) about where I found something online, but I often remember the associated illustration, and quickly recognize it when I scan my Pinterest boards. Because images “pinned” from the web link back to the original source, this lets me quickly retrieve the related stories.

I’ve been updating the CFM boards, adding a new board for each of the themes in TrendsWatch 2015: Open Data, Ethical Consumerism, Personalization, Rising Tides, Wearable Technology and Slow Culture. I’ll continue to add images (linked to their originating stories and sites), throughout the year. Here are a few examples of what I’ve found so far. Please do send me links for suggested additions!

This is a picture of the depressed, tweeting, plush lobsters created in one of the projects generated at an art data hack at Tate Modern last year. I mentioned these "Phamaceutically Active Crustaceans" in TrendsWatch, but couldn’t get permissions to use this particular shot. Isn’t it great? (The open datasets mashed up in this project were statistics about antidepressant use and recent findings about the emotions of crustaceans.)

This is an example of an image leading me to a news item. I was doing a Google image search on "unpaid internships" to see what turned up, and this picture led me to a story about a group protesting internship policies at the Serpentine Gallery.

Here's another example of an image leading me to a story. In this case, scanning other people's boards about 3-D printing, I found this striking image and used it in a Wordless Wednesday post. Later I co-opted it to illustrate how technology is supporting the creation of personalized products, since Harker encourages buyers to customize his masks to their own face using 3D scanning.Rising Tides

My project assistant, Sylvea Hollis, tracked down artist Michael Pinsky and got his permission to use a PR shot of this installation in TrendsWatch. "Plunge" used LED lights installed on landmarks around London to visualize sea levels a 1000 years in the future.

I note in the introduction to TrendsWatch 2015 that this year's trends intertwine with each other in many ways. I actually used this picture of a bespoke prosthetic leg for the essay on personalization (since it reflects a highly personal vision of what the user, Kiera Roche, wants from from her prosthesis, but I pinned it to Wearable Tech. Most of the images on this theme are endless variations on "look at our cool new gadget! It synchs with your smartphone! It connects to the web!" This picture says a thousand words about how technology can serve deeply human needs about identity and self. Kiera says, about her vision for this limb“My attitude to being an amputee and wearing an artificial limb has changed with time. To begin with one is very aware of being different, of being disfigured, but as time moves on one adjusts and changes perspective. In the first few years my focus was on trying to be normal, wearing clothes that hid the fact that I was an amputee, but over the years I have become more comfortable with who I am and I now embrace having different legs for different activities and different occasions. I think losing a limb has a massive impact on one’s self esteem and body image. Having a beautifully crafted limb designed for you makes you feel special.”Slow Culture

I loved this image of a slow reading club in Wellington, New Zealand. We couldn't track down the photographer, but it inspired us to stage the picture of me that appears in the introduction to TrendsWatch. (OK, we added dinosaurs and a robot, but hey, embellishment).So, if you are a visual thinker, and like noodling around with pictures to spark your creative process, start your own Pinterest boards, and follow CFM. I look forward to seeing what you pin.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

That’s a core message of the locavore/sustainable food
movement, and it doesn’t resonate so well with most folks. It sounds ridiculous
on the face of it—who wants to pay
more for food?

But proponents of creating a “slow,” sustainable system of food
production have a point. “Fast” food is cheap because we pass a lot of the cost
on to society as a whole and future generations in particular. Subsidizing corn
makes products using corn syrup inexpensive at the grocery store, but offloads
the cost of obesity, diabetes and poor nutrition onto families, insurers and
the social safety net. Water subsidies make it possible to grow cotton in areas
where it would never naturally thrive, contributing to deforestation,
water shortages and pollution.

Same with fast fashion. H&M can sell a polyester/spandex
long-sleeved dress for $24.95 in part because it manufactures
a quarter of its clothes in Bangladesh, which has the lowest wages in the
world. And factories in the third world don’t have the costs of complying with
OSHA regulations or the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The fact is, anything that looks like too good a bargain
probably is hiding the true cost somewhere, present or future. Formally, these
hidden economics are called “externalities” –costs that affect someone who
didn’t choose to incur that cost. In TrendsWatch
2015 I point out that one of the reason “slow” goods and experiences (slow
food, slow fashion, slow travel) are so expensive is that they tend to embody
their full costs in their market price, while their cheaper alternatives
externalize those costs onto others.

Benefits can be externalized, too. One example much in the
news is the “herd immunity” that arises from a critical mass of people being
vaccinated against communicable diseases. In other words, when you pay for a
vaccine, you generate a (free) benefit to people in high-risk categories (e.g.,
infants, immunocompromised) who can’t themselves be vaccinated.

Economists see externalities—both costs and benefits—as signs
of an inefficient market. Externalized costs mean a supplier makes more of a
product than they would otherwise (since it is artificially cheap to produce).
Externalized benefits result in the opposite: suppliers produce less of a
product or service than they could because they aren’t getting paid the full
value of their work. With more income, they would have the incentive, and
means, to scale up.

Museums would do well to consider the externalized costs and
benefits hidden in our nonprofit economic calculations, and how they affect the
“supply chain” of museum services.

As publicly supported nonprofits, museums do have
externalized costs that some people have not (personally) agreed to pay. By
removing themselves from the tax rolls, museums freeload on city services
supported by those taxes—though some municipalities are offsetting this with
Payments in Lieu of Taxes. What are the side effects of these subsidies? Might
the artificially low cost of running a museum (due to the subsidies provided by
local, state and federal governments) actually lead to an overabundance of
museums? Maybe this is one economic contributor to the all too common situation
in which the population of nonprofit museums strains, or exceeds, the capacity
of funders. (I refer you to the Kykuit II Summit
on the sustainability of historic sites for a graphic description of the
scope of that problem.)

It’s more cheerful to contemplate the externalized benefits
museums provide—good things we provide even to people who don’t pay for them. Most
museums get more support from admissions, membership fees and earned income than
they do from tax subsidies or direct government support. But the presence of
these museum benefits the whole community, even the whole
state, not just visitors, members and donors. By acting as “anchor
institutions,” museums can stimulate the local economy and make a
neighborhood or city more attractive to prospective residents and employers. These benefits, however, often go
unrecognized, especially when they can’t be tied directly to economic activity.
As I suggested in an earlier post, museums may want to find a way to attach a
dollar value to the “pleasure” they provide, directly to users or
indirectly to the community, to make sure that this benefit is taken into
account when government entities reexamine their budgets and funding.

Of course, sometimes whether museum’s externalities
constitute a benefit or cost may depend on your point of view. For example, museums
can be agents of gentrification, raising
property values and attracting a new (younger, richer, whiter) demographic
to a neighborhood. Residents displaced by rising rents may feel that they are
incurring considerable externalized costs generated by an organization they may
not want or use. (This tension surfaced this week in a debate
over the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and its planned expansion, with some
community members feeling that the museum has shifted its attention to wealthier
residents and neighborhoods, rather than their traditional base.)

So to go back to my earlier point, as I understand it, economists
hold that underpriced resources muck up the system either by passing the buck
on true costs, or by failing to reimburse the producer for true benefits. How
does this play out in our field?

Our legacy to future generations may include large numbers
of semi-solvent institutions that need to be propped up or closed down when
their true costs can no longer be kicked down the road. Or it may it may offer
a paucity of vibrant, productive institutions that would have been fostered by
charging fair value for the myriad benefits we create. Or maybe both. What do
you think?

Monday, March 9, 2015

Here’s a quick roundup of recent stories related to the
themes in TrendsWatch 2015 (Haven’t got your copy yet? Download
the free PDF here. Print copies will be available in the AAM Bookstore
soon.)

Open Data

Here’s a story I featured in Dispatches from the Future of
Museums last week, about the new Data
for Everyone initiative that shares data sets collected through the
crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower. As an incentive to sharing, CrowdFlower
waives licensing fees for clients willing to make their data public (they still
charge for data collection). The data sets released so far include research on
why people perceived the notorious dress as blue/black or white/gold; sentiment
analysis on why people don’t like McDonalds, and lots of linguistic and
demographic analyses.

The tech world is waiting to see if the imminent
release of the Apple Watch will finally convince consumers they want/need
to see their social media feeds, apps and email on their wrist instead of their
smart phone. (Smart watches introduced by Samsung and Android pretty much
bombed.)

Ethical Everything

The financial gurus at Motley Fool examine why McDonalds
is losing market share to Chipotle, in part because Chipotle is branding
itself around ethics, their motto being “Food with Integrity.” Sustainable,
humane farming practices may make food more expensive, but evidently it makes
it more desirable to Millennial consumers, too.

And on another ethics note, Ringling Brothers and Barnum
& Bailey Circus announced last week that it will phase
out the use of elephants in its shows by 2018. While the article I link to
(in the NYT) frames this as an economic decision, the economics are unworkable
because so many cities and municipalities have banned the use of elephants, and
those local ordinances are driven by ethical concerns.

Rising Tides

Today’s
climate kurfluffle is the allegation that officials in Florida have
(verbally) forbidden employees of the Florida Department of Environmental
Protection to use the terms ‘climate change.’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability.”
Former employees have gone on record as saying this makes it difficult to
protect Florida’s coral reefs and deal with imminent threats from rising sea
levels.

Slow Culture

You might enjoy this
essay celebrating the joys of slow travel (2.7 MPH via horse and mule),
part of the Rediscover the Prairie project to document and save the grasslands
of the Great Plains. Or this
story documenting examples of (painfully) slow art, documenting the
historical origins of the genre.

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

I'm plotting a year of exploring the Trendwatch 2015 themes: Sometimes via live events (keep an eye on the CFM's web page futureofmuseums.org for upcoming engagements), but mostly over the web. I hope you will find an opportunity to dive in.

First up, a CFM Twitter chat on Open Data on Friday, March 13 from 1–2 p.m. (ET). Twitter chats are a great way to pool the collective knowledge, resources and ideas of our colleagues.

This chat will be co-hosted by Ed Rodley, associate director of integrated media at the Peabody Essex Museum. Ed blogs at Thinking about Museums, and wrote a marvelous essay—quoted in TrendsWatch—on why museums should give their data away (The Virtues of Promiscuity).

(Also for your radar on the topic of "open," a Google+ Hangout on Open Licensing organized by the Alliance's Media & Technology Professional Network and the New Media Consortium. It will be held Thursday, March 5, 2–3 p.m. (ET). Highly recommend!)

Recap of the Trend

The open data movement is about getting information out in the world where it can be mined, mashed up and put to work. This means putting data onto the web in standardized, accessible formats. We are in the midst of a huge push to make U.S. government data "open"--not only commonly used resources like census information but also previously inaccessible information such as databases generated by government-funded research. In the museum realm, see the Institute of Museum and Library Services' recently established Data Catalog https://data.imls.gov.

What we will do in the Chat and how you can prepare

Here a few things you can do in advance to make the chat a useful & enjoyable event:

Read the chapter in TrendsWatch 2015 on open data. You can download a free copy here.

Take time before the chat to queue up some material that you want to share ahead of time: text and links you can copy and paste into tweets during the chat. (That makes it much easier to pay attention to what everyone else is tweeting.)

For example, we will be inviting you to share:

Resources: links to papers, websites, that provide information & tools about open data

Authorities: blog addresses and Twitter handles for people you look to for smart commentary on this topic

Examples of museums working in various ways with open data: creating APIs for their museum's digital resources; hosting hackathons; doing interesting things with other people's open data

As well as your thoughts on:

Your dream application for open data: what datasets would you like to mine, to what end?

As we move towards a presumption of "open," what kinds of data is it acceptable for museums to redact or conceal?

How To Participate

If you do not already have one, create a Twitter account. Really folks, it's not all "here's what I had for breakfast" & "check out the LOL cats." There are many people sharing useful resources via tweets, as well as reporting out in real time from conferences & events you may not be able to attend. Follow @futureofmuseums (that's me) and check out the list of folks I follow for some ideas.

On Friday, March 13, during the chat period of 1–2 p.m. (ET), tweet using the hashtag #TrendsWatch.

You can focus on just the tweets related to the chat (out of all the tweets in your stream) by using Twitter’s own search tool, or a third-party tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite, to filter the conversation with the #TrendsWatch hashtag

Ed and I will tweet questions in the format

Q#: (for example, Q1: what are some articles, resources, sites you recommend for info on Open data?)

I will summarize and post the conversation after it wraps up, but I hope you choose to engage in real time! This chat is also a good opportunity to find, and follow, other Tweeters who synch with your interests.